The study of human cognition may be viewed as the study of those processes and structures employed in perception and memory. In large part, the processes involved are those of abstraction and generation. If abstraction is viewed as a process of perceptual encoding, generation may be considered as a process of location, activation, and/or elaboration of previous perceptual encodings. Previous research has suggested that people are able to alter the underlying representational codes of externally presented information through an internal mechanism of information generation. Preliminary work by the present writer has indicated that people facilitate their processing of external visual signals by generating appropriate representational models in advance. By using a character-classification task in which the stages of human information processing have been well-mapped, it should be possible to determine a) the specific role of a generated representation, b) the time course for its development, c) the kinds of representational models that can be generated, and d) the number of representational models that may be generated at one time. By studying generative processes in a highly-controlled situation, a foundation may be laid for a better understanding of these processes which must underlie much of thinking from language production to problem solving.